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French President Emmanuel Macron delivers a speech during the plenary session of the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit at the Grand Palais in Paris, France, on Feb. 11, 2025.
France’s nuclear power supply to fuel AI
France has real AI ambitions — and nuclear energy might be the key to unlocking them. Ahead of the AI Action Summit, which kicked off on Monday at the Grand Palais in Paris, the French government announced $113 billion in new investments in artificial intelligence at the summit, investments that will be powered by 1 gigawatt of dedicated nuclear power.
The initiative, spearheaded by the British data center company FluidStack, will begin construction in the third quarter of 2025. It seeks to achieve a similar scale to Stargate, the US government-backed project to expand the data center capacity of industry leader OpenAI.
The Wall Street Journal reports that France has 57 nuclear reactors at 18 separate plants, generating two-thirds of its national energy supply from nuclear, a clean energy source. Additionally, it had surplus energy last year, which it exported.Fish and sashimi imported from Tokyo are displayed for sale at a market on August 24, 2023 in Hong Kong, China.
Fish fight: China vs Japan
Japan, along with many independent scientists and the International Atomic Energy Agency, have said the water is safe. Japan’s Prime Minister Kishida even publicly ate fish from the affected area. But China isn’t buying it. Beijing sharply protested the release, banned imports of Japanese fish, and urged others to follow its lead.
This conflict appears to go well beyond safety concerns. In fact, China has been accused of deliberately spreading misinformation about the health risks from this event, prompting vandalism and threats against Japanese people and companies in China.
But so far, China has been unable to persuade more of Japan’s neighbors to join in the outrage. At a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in July, China called on member states to denounce Japan’s water discharge plan, but the joint communique that followed the meeting ignored the issue entirely. At another ASEAN meeting earlier this month, China’s Premier Li Qiang sharply criticized both Japan’s water plan and Kishida, but the issue was then dropped.
It appears that wariness of China’s growing influence has been a more important factor in the Great East Asian Fish Fight than the region’s traditional mistrust of Japan.